Publications Details
Phenomenological direct containment heating models in CONTAIN and their assessment against experimental data
In previous years, a suite of interim models had been developed for the CONTAIN code for analyzing direct containment heating (DCH) accidents. The initial development and application of these DCH models are described in a previous WRS paper. While useful, these interim models were incomplete and were highly parametric. The parametric nature of the interim CONTAIN DCH models was necessary at the time because of the lack of relevant DCH experimental data, and to facilitate sensitivity studies aimed at improving our understanding of the most important governing processes in a DCH event. However, today our understanding of DCH phenomenology is significantly improved from when the interim DCH models were developed. This understanding largely stems from recently completed NRC-sponsored DCH experiments at Sandia National Laboratories and Argonne National Laboratory. New models have been developed and added to the CONTAIN code for modeling DCH events to reflect this improvement in our understanding of DCH. The purpose of this paper is to describe the new DCH models in CONTAIN. A demonstration of the new models by comparing simplified calculations against relevant DCH test data will also be presented in this paper. This paper is an extension of the preliminary descriptions of the DCH model improvements presented in the 19th WRS paper. The new models that have been added to CONTAIN for analyzing DCH are briefly discussed below. The following paragraphs also include brief discussions of the motivation and/or basis for the developed improvement. The models are described in greater detail in the full paper.